STANDING ON THE BOARD SIDEWALK beside Jenkins’s display window was the dapper local photographer, Scooter Willems. Today he looked extra-fashionable in a seersucker suit with a straw boater. As always, he had his camera and tripod with him. I wondered whether he had just photographed me in action.
“Where’d you learn to fight like that, Ben?”
“Boxing team at college,” I said.
“No, I mean, where’d you learn to put your thumbs in a man’s throat like that? Looks like you learned to fight in the street,” Scooter said.
“I reckon I just have the instinct,” I said.
“Mind if I take your photograph, Ben?”
I remembered the night I first saw him, photographing George Pearson. “I do mind, Scooter. My clothes are a mess.”
“That’s what would make it interesting,” he said with a big smile.
“Maybe for you. Not for me. Don’t take my picture.”
“I will honor your wishes, of course.” Scooter folded the tripod and walked away.
I tucked my shirt into my torn trousers, and when I brushed my hand against my chin, it came back bloody.
Moody Cross stepped out of Sanders’s store with a sack of rice on one hip and a bag of groceries on her arm. She walked toward me.
r />
“You are beyond learning,” she said.
I used my handkerchief to wipe off the blood. “And what is it I have failed to learn, Moody?”
“You can go around trying to fight every white man in Mississippi that hates colored people,” she said, “but it won’t do any good. There’s a lot more of them than there is of you. You can’t protect us. Nobody can do that. Not even God.”
She turned to walk away, but then she looked back. “But thank you for trying,” she said.
Chapter 61
IN FOUR WEEKS OF LIVING at Maybelle’s, I’d come to realize that my room was so damp, so airless, so overheated night and day, that nothing ever really dried out.
My clothes, my hand towel, and my shave towel were always damp. My hair was moist at all times. As much as I toweled off, powdered with talc, and blotted with witch hazel, my shirts and underclothes always retained a film of moisture. This stifling closet at the top of Maybelle’s stairs was a punishment, a torture, a prison.
And besides, there was so much to keep me awake at night.
I longed for a letter from home.
And maybe because I didn’t hear, I wrestled with thoughts of Elizabeth. I could still feel our kiss in front of her house.
I wondered if Roosevelt had ever gotten my wire. Surely he would have sent some answer by now. What if that telegraph operator in McComb had taken exception to the facts as I was reporting them?
And here I was, quite a sight, if anyone happened in to see me. I lay crosswise on the iron bed, naked, atop sweat-moistened sheets. I had tied a wet rag around my head; every half hour or so, I refreshed it with cool water from the washbasin.
But no one could win the battle against a Mississippi summer. Your only hope was to lie low and move as little as possible.
“Mr. Corbett.”
At first I thought the voice came from the landing, but no, it came from outside.
Beneath my window.
“Mr. Corbett.”